…visit Louis Pasteur’s crypt. Fascinating post from Matthew at Holy Whapping:

The scientist’s burial site is of great interest to both to those seeking a place of pilgrimage and a forgotten gem of Catholic architecture. I have never been there myself but was greatly struck by a number of photographs I recently came across. The French state had almost immediately set out to take the old man’s body to Paris’s sterile, secularized Valhalla at the Panthéon, to lie alongside such unlikely bedfellows as Voltaire and the original of all yuppie self-actualization gurus, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Mrs. Pasteur thought otherwise, and had a marvelous Byzantine crypt build in the basement of the Pasteur Institute, a stunning, darkly glowing jewel-box of black-veined marble and low, looming mosaic’d vaults filled with allegorical angels holding placards for SCIENCE and CHARITE amid a profusion of neo-paleo-Christian vine leaves and odder touches such as bunny rabits and pack of slavering, chained-up dogs representing respectively the first test audience for his vaccine, and the diseases Pasteur sought to vanquish. (Incidentally, The Catholic Encyclopedia makes the odd and rather unfortunate comparison of the shape of a streptoccocus with that of a rosary.) Under the main vault is a mirror-polished black sarcophagus, quite simple, and in the apse, under the Alpha and the Omega, is an umistakably Catholic altar with tabernacle, crucifix and six candlesticks. It took only a year to build.